One of the problems faced by hospital groups in metropolitan areas relates to the coordinating of schedules of specialists. Specifically, in order to be more efficient, multiple hospitals within a geographic area may share specialists. As a result, it is necessary to inform each of the hospitals who is on call for each speciality at a given time. In most cases, this is done by couriering manually updated lists to each hospital. As will be appreciated, this method is slow, laborious and time-consuming. Furthermore, other aspects of this system, for example, changes to scheduling, tracking of calls and billing, are very difficult to manage.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,289,531 teaches an electronic scheduler for rescheduling appointments into open time slots based on user criteria. Thus, this system is arranged to contact individuals one at a time and provide them with choices for rescheduling appointments.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,016,478 teaches an electronic personal information manager which permits peer-to-peer group scheduling. Thus, this system is arranged to schedule a meeting to be attended by several individuals.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,104,788 teaches a system enabling a user to remotely access an electronic calendar. However, the system is for a single calendar and a single user.
According to a first aspect of the invention, there is provided a scheduling system comprising:
a telephone interface for making outgoing calls or faxes and receiving incoming calls;
an internet interface for accepting incoming email or postings and for sending out emails or modifying web pages;
a memory for storing a plurality of calendars;
a comptroller interface for to reporting time spent on call by the specialists to the comptroller for billing purposes;
an administrator interface for reporting changes or amendments to the schedules;
an engine for instructing the telephone interface and the internet interface to send out notification of changes in schedules and bills; and
a voice synthesizer or phrase bank for prompting incoming calls or outgoing calls.